Category «Legal Research»

Is A Crypto Collapse Inevitable?

Jerry Lawson and Elizabeth Southerland identify technical reasons why the crypto bubble is bursting, including the fact that theoretically unbreakable encryption schemes like those underpinning blockchain have proven to be less than impermeable in practice, as users of Coinbase discovered upon losing fortunes. Attackers go after the weakest link in the chain, usually the way in which the algorithm is implemented. Perhaps more ominous, the emergence of a new class of devices called quantum computers threatens to eat the algorithms that underlie crypto for lunch.

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Subjects: Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Cryptocurrency, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 24, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: How Your New Car Tracks You; Democratic senators concerned Amazon health platform ‘harvesting consumer health data from patients’; How generative AI is creating new classes of security threats; and US cyber ambassador says China can win on AI, cloud.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Data Mining, Healthcare, Intellectual Property, KM, Legal Research, Privacy, RSS Newsfeeds

Suicide Hotlines Promise Anonymity. Dozens of Their Websites Send Sensitive Data to Facebook

Reporter Colin Lecher and Data Journalist Jon Kreeger discuss how websites for mental health crisis resources across the country—which promise anonymity for visitors, many of whom are at a desperate moment in their lives—have been quietly sending sensitive visitor data to Facebook. Dozens of websites tied to the national mental health crisis 988 hotline, which launched last summer, transmit the data through a tool called the Meta Pixel, according to testing conducted by The Markup. That data often included signals to Facebook when visitors attempted to dial for mental health emergencies by tapping on dedicated call buttons on the websites.

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Subjects: Big Data, Health, Healthcare, KM, Legal Research, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 17, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: The dos and don’ts of using home security cameras that see everything; Social Engineering And The Disinformation Threat In Cybersecurity; The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens; and The Expert’s Guide to Online Privacy in 2023.

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Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Gadgets/Gizmos, Privacy

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 11, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Top 5 Most Common Text Message Scams & How to Avoid Them; From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You; Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups; and FTC Slams Amazon with $30.8M Fine for Privacy Violations Involving Alexa and Ring.

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Subjects: AI, Communications, Congress, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Email Security, Healthcare, KM, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

How AI could take over elections and undermine democracy

Archon Fung, Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard Kennedy School, and Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard University, pose the question: “Could organizations use artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways? Sen. Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, U.S. Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters. Altman did not elaborate, but he might have had something like this scenario in mind. Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election. While platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube use forms of AI to get users to spend more time on their sites, Clogger’s AI would have a different objective: to change people’s voting behavior.

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Subjects: AI, Communications Law, Congress, Constitutional Law, KM, Legal Research, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, June 3, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: New EPIC Report Sheds Light on Generative A.I. Harms; Don’t Store Your Money on Venmo, U.S. Govt Agency Warns (or PayPal); FTC Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers, Failed to Stop Hackers from Taking Control of Users’ Cameras; and Twitter withdraws from EU’s disinformation code as bloc warns against hiding from liability.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System, KM, Privacy, Spyware, United States Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 27, 2023

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Essay on the poisoning of LLMs—ChatGPT in particular; Chinese hackers seek capabilities to disrupt communications between US and Asia in event of crisis, Microsoft says; CISA and Partners Update the #StopRansomware Guide; and How To Switch to Using Passkeys With Your Google Accounts.

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Subjects: AI, Cryptocurrency, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Financial System, Healthcare, Privacy, Social Media, Viruses & Hoaxes

AI has social consequences, but who pays the price? Tech companies’ problem with ‘ethical debt’

As a technology ethics educator and researcher, Carey Fiesler has thought about AI systems amplifying harmful biases and stereotypes, students using AI deceptively, privacy concerns, people being fooled by misinformation, and labor exploitation. Fiesler characterizes this not at technical debt but as accruing ethical debt. Just as technical debt can result from limited testing during the development process, ethical debt results from not considering possible negative consequences or societal harms. And with ethical debt in particular, the people who incur it are rarely the people who pay for it in the end.

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Subjects: AI, Cyberlaw, Education, Ethics, Human Rights, KM, Legal Ethics, Technology Trends

In the post-AI legal world, what will lawyers do?

Jordan Furlong writes the legal profession is about to go through what manufacturing already has. In the next few years, legally trained generative AI will replace lawyer labour on a scale we’ve never seen before. An enormous amount of lawyer activity consists of researching, analyzing, writing, developing arguments, critiquing counter-claims, and drafting responses. A machine has now come along that does most of these things, much faster than we do. Today, the machine needs lawyers to carefully review its efforts. Within two years, I doubt it will.

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Subjects: AI, Communication Skills, KM, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession, Legal Research, Technology Trends, United States Law
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